This article seems to model rational discourse as a cybernetic system made of two opposite actions that need to be balanced:
Agreement / support of shared actions
Disagreement / criticism
Agreement and disagreement are not basic elements of a statement about base reality, they’re contextual facts about the relation of your belief to others’ beliefs. Is “the sky is blue” agreement or dissent? Depends on what other people are saying. If they’re saying it’s blue, it’s agreement. If they’re saying it’s green, it’s dissent. Someone might disagree with someone by supporting an action, or agree with a criticism of what was previously a shared story. When you have a specific belief about the world, that belief is not made of disagreement or agreement with others, it’s made of constrained conditional anticipations about your observations.
This error seems likely related to using a synagogue fundraiser as the central case of a shared commitment of resources, rather than something like an assurance contract! There’s a very obvious antirational motive for synagogue fundraisers not to welcome criticism—God is made up, and a community organized around the things its members would genuinely like to do together wouldn’t need to invoke fictitious justifications. Rational coordination should be structurally superior, not just the same old methods but for a better cause.
Insofar as there’s something to be rescued from this post, it’s that establishing common knowledge of well-known facts is underrated, because it helps with coordination to turn mutual knowledge into common knowledge so everyone can rely on everyone else in the community acting on that info. But that also recommends blurting out, “The emperor’s naked!”.
There’s also the problem that sometimes people say stuff that’s off-topic and not helpful enough to be worth it—but compressing the complexity of that problem down to managing the level of agreement vs criticism is substituting an easier but unhelpful task in place of a more difficult but important one.
In hindsight, a norm against criticizing during a fundraiser, when there is always a fundraiser, leads to a community getting scammed by people telling an incoherent story about an all-powerful imaginary guy, just like they did in the synagogue example.
This article seems to model rational discourse as a cybernetic system made of two opposite actions that need to be balanced:
Agreement / support of shared actions
Disagreement / criticism
Agreement and disagreement are not basic elements of a statement about base reality, they’re contextual facts about the relation of your belief to others’ beliefs. Is “the sky is blue” agreement or dissent? Depends on what other people are saying. If they’re saying it’s blue, it’s agreement. If they’re saying it’s green, it’s dissent. Someone might disagree with someone by supporting an action, or agree with a criticism of what was previously a shared story. When you have a specific belief about the world, that belief is not made of disagreement or agreement with others, it’s made of constrained conditional anticipations about your observations.
This error seems likely related to using a synagogue fundraiser as the central case of a shared commitment of resources, rather than something like an assurance contract! There’s a very obvious antirational motive for synagogue fundraisers not to welcome criticism—God is made up, and a community organized around the things its members would genuinely like to do together wouldn’t need to invoke fictitious justifications. Rational coordination should be structurally superior, not just the same old methods but for a better cause.
Insofar as there’s something to be rescued from this post, it’s that establishing common knowledge of well-known facts is underrated, because it helps with coordination to turn mutual knowledge into common knowledge so everyone can rely on everyone else in the community acting on that info. But that also recommends blurting out, “The emperor’s naked!”.
There’s also the problem that sometimes people say stuff that’s off-topic and not helpful enough to be worth it—but compressing the complexity of that problem down to managing the level of agreement vs criticism is substituting an easier but unhelpful task in place of a more difficult but important one.
In hindsight, a norm against criticizing during a fundraiser, when there is always a fundraiser, leads to a community getting scammed by people telling an incoherent story about an all-powerful imaginary guy, just like they did in the synagogue example.